Emerging Europe’s start-up scene is thriving: new money and new ideas are coming onto the market all the time. To keep you up to date with the latest investments, innovations, movers and shakers, every week Emerging Europe brings you a round-up of the region’s start-up news.
Lande: Latvian fintech raises pre-seed round for Romanian expansion
Latvian fintech start-up Lande has raised a pre-seed round of 550,000 euros to enter Romania, continuing its expansion in Europe.
The round was led by LATBAN, with the participation of BADideas.fund and additional investment coming from a Seedrs campaign.
An agricultural financing and crowdfunding platform, Lande helps small and medium-sized farms obtain capital using machinery, land, or future harvest as collateral.
By expanding to Romania, Lande will support its highly active agricultural sector, currently affected by increased production costs as a result of the current geopolitical situation, as well as the ongoing climate crisis.
Accounting for 10 per cent of EU grain and oilseed production, Romania is a significant food exporter in the region. By making financing more accessible for medium and small farms to invest in improving their productivity and efficiency, there’s potential for increased production output.
“By enabling financial support to small and medium-sized European farms, Lande is doing more than reducing the regional funding gap – we’re contributing to regional and global food affordability,” says Nikita Goncars, CEO of Lande.
“More than 1,700 investors have already registered on the platform to invest in Europe’s agricultural industry. It’s not only a good option to diversify one’s investment portfolio but also a chance to engage in supporting processes that affect billions of people’s lives.”
In 2021, Lande announced a merger with the agricultural crowdfunding platform LendSecured, becoming a full-service platform for agricultural financing and crowdfunding.
The platform has thus far operated in the Baltics and has issued over 4.5 million euros in loans to date, providing financing to 300+ local farmers.
DoxyChain: Digital contract management start-up raises 2.2 million euros.
DoxyChain, a Polish start-up building a solution for traditional document management transition to Web 3.0 last week raised 2.2 million euros from international investors to power its growth.
The early seed round was led by Level2 Ventures. The new capital will support further product development, team growth and foreign expansion — to the European and US markets.
Founded in 2019, DoxyChain’s digital contract management system records information securely in the blockchain. Once recorded, the data can’t be changed. Further, it’s only possible to update the data incrementally, giving a complete history of changes made. DoxyChain’s cloud-based storage system enables teams to manage documents simultaneously and access the platform via mobile devices easily.
“We are now launching two new SaaS features,” says CTO and Co-founder of Doxy Chain Piotr Żelazko.
“Working on our SaaS layer, we have observed that the scope of the use cases is so broad that we cannot cover them all one by one. Instead, we can do better: we can build a modular infrastructure that allows our clients to develop their own tailored advanced workflows and use cases on top of it. Such an infrastructure will be our seed milestone.”
DoxyChain aims to become the best global infrastructure for documents, combining traditional frontends with Web 3.0 features. DoxyChain was looking for investors who, on the one hand, have an excellent understanding of the blockchain technology itself, and on the other, know the B2B enterprise solutions market well.
“In October, we are launching DoxyCert and DoxyConnect,” adds Gabriel Dymowski, CEO and co-founder of DoxyChain.
“DoxyCert is a toolkit that allows clients to issue blockchain certificates, also as NFTs, which will be used as undeniable proof of authenticity or ownership. A certificate is a specific type of a document that requires the highest level of security and transparency throughout its life cycle. The second major platform feature is DoxyConnect, which will serve like a data room. Built on the blockchain, it lets the parties of a document exchange transact in a secure and easy way never seen before.”
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